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Part Three - Birth Pains
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"I'll support you financially, so just get lost in 「Tsukihime」,' he said." (Nasu)
"We were both at our limits back then. We had no money, and no one else understood us." (Takeuchi)
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Editor |
Please talk about the problems you had while making 「Tsukihime」.
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Nasu |
There were so many, I've completely forgot them all.
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Takeuchi |
Yeah. I was still working at my day job back then, and handling both was really stressful.
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Editor |
So you mean you would go to work during the day, then come home and work on it at night? How long did you work until?
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Takeuchi |
I would always work until around 3 AM. I could get to work in five minutes on my bike, so I would come home during my lunch break as well and work. And once I did enough work, I would go back. And so on and so forth.
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Nasu |
I never knew that. (^_^;)
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Takeuchi |
It's true.
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Nasu |
Ahh, I can't look you straight in the face now. (Laughs)
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Editor |
How about you, Nasu-san?
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Nasu |
I was working at a game company...(looks at Takeuchi-san) but I'm not supposed to talk about that. A series of events led to me quitting. But I had no way of supporting myself afterwards, so after talking with Takeuchi, he said "I'll support you financially, so just get lost in 「Tsukihime」." I couldn't have asked for anything better. So I quit my job in January and then concentrated on nothing but 「Tsukihime」 until May. For four months...yeah, I think I wrote about 5000 pages. It was so much work that I can't really remember it too well.
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Takeuchi |
We were both at our limits back then. We had no money, and no one else that understood us. (*1) So mentally, it was very taxing.
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Nasu |
I wrote day and night, but that was all I could do. I didn't work as hard as Takeuchi did.
People talk a lot about how many pages of text there was, but the number of images should actually be more surprising, I think, and I want people to understand this. Takeuchi, by himself, did all the work on every graphic, from sketching to coloring. People often say "the coloring is a bit amateurish" but I wish they'd give us a little more slack here. I know that works should be judged without taking the behind-the-scenes circumstances into question, and it may sound a little unfair, but...
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Takeuchi |
I only had enough time to color each image for two hours. I know there are a lot of critical things that have been said about the quality of the colors, and we'll have to fix that for next time. I know my limits, so I think I'll have to rely on some help for our next project.
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Editor |
That's...an interesting declaration.
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Takeuchi |
Yes. I had another person (*2) work on coloring for 「Kagetsu Tohya」. The quality was so much better, it actually scared me.
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"I thought I couldn't think up random lines for Kohaku."
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Editor |
Could you tell us about what you like to call the "seven days of fire?"
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Nasu |
That was seven days where we barely got the final test version (the alpha version) completed. After we released the beta version, we were both so worn out, that we didn't do anything for a whole month. In the end of September, we decided it was time to get rolling again, and we had gotten a lot of comments from people who had played the beta version. Kohaku was SO popular. I thought she would be, but not to that extent. I'll let Takeuchi explain the rest...
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Takeuchi |
I thought that it was necessary to make a Kohaku scenario, even if it was a really simple one. Personally I thought we could just split off the Hisui scenario and then make a path for Kohaku-san. We talked about this in the Mr. Donuts in my hometown...
Nasu was totally compliant there. "OK, sure," he said, but then later I get this call saying "Actually, I can't do this." "What?!" I thought. But then he went on, saying "If I'm going to do this, I want to do it right. It'll be tough on our schedules, but let's try to work hard on this." Then we both were on the right track again.
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Nasu |
So we started with the plot. To me, Kohaku was just a shadow of Hisui, and it was hard for me to think up random lines for her. I didn't want to do it that way, either.
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All |
(Laugh)
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Nasu |
We had to give the Kohaku scenario an ending, and I didn't have confidence in that. No matter what way I did it, it would end up tainting the ending in the Hisui scenario.
So I didn't want to write something like that. I spent painstaking hours thinking of a plot, and then showed it to Takeuchi without much confidence. I decided I couldn't be confident in it unless he gave me the OK. He was the meter that measured us all, so his OK was always the final word. Eventually, he called me back: "It's good. Write it." "Alright, I'm off to die now," I said (Laughs). It took about ten days to get the Kohaku scenario ready. I wrote one day's worth of game time in one day's worth of real time.
I couldn't take even a single day off...in the beginning it was fine, but as I reached the climax, I started to go numb. My mental state was really in the red zone. Before a really difficult scene, I decided to take a rest...and what do you know, I was working on it in my dream! (Laughs)
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All |
(Laugh)
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Nasu |
"This isn't working, this isn't working!" I kept thinking, then I woke myself up.
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Editor |
Wow. (Laughs)
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Nasu |
"Ahh, I slept for 3 hours. I have to get to work. Ahh, but I'm so tired. I'm going back to sleep." I kept saying, in this dream. And the scene was already finished! It was really a nightmarish week. Really tough.
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Takeuchi |
That reminds me, you realized that the scenario would work once you figured out that it would make an enemy of Akiha, right?
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Nasu |
Yes. I had always wanted to make her an enemy in some scenario, you know. And it just happened that things worked out there. I figured if I was going to make a Kohaku route, it'd be best to do it this way. That was the light at the end of the tunnel for me. I realized that it was worth doing after all.
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Editor |
So making Akiha into an enemy is what brought the Kohaku scenario to life.
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Nasu |
It sort of reincarnated a dead idea. Up until then I was only writing the Kohaku scenario because Takeuchi convinced me to. Now that I look back on it, I really really didn't want to. (Laughs)
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"We had Arc mumbling stuff as a cat."
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Editor |
Did you ever have any last-minute ideas that you simply had to put in?
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Takeuchi |
Yes.
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Editor |
Like Ciel-sensei?
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Nasu |
That was horrible. (Laughs) Listen to this. Two days before the completed version was ready, I was doing final testing at OKSG's house. Then all of a sudden her FAX machine starts going off. I look at what comes out, and there's a picture of Ciel-sensei standing there. "Look what I drew!" I was like, "WHAT?!" (Laughs)
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Editor |
So he was sort of ordering you there? "I already drew it, so put it in!"
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Takeuchi |
No I wasn't! (Laughs) We really wanted to make a hint corner because the game was so long. We just weren't sure who was going to give out the hints. At first we thought it'd be OK to have Aozaki Aoko give out the hints, but Nasu said we'd work on that at the end. So as I was thinking about what to do, I decided to make Ciel into the sensei. So I sent that over.
Another idea was to have Arc mumbling stuff as a cat (Neco-Arc), and when I showed it to Nasu, he liked it as well. "Alright, I can do some extra work for this," he said.
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Nasu |
Originally I thought of making the hint corner really basic, like "Do this here," in one sentence, but when I got that picture, I thought, "Hmm, maybe this could be fun." (Laughs)
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Editor |
I can't believe you made all that in only two days.
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Nasu |
I was dying. (Laughs)
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Takeuchi |
Thanks to your work, a lot of people were able to enjoy it.
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Editor |
It seems like you have a real "nose-to-the-grindstone" mentality when it comes to work. Is Takeuchi-san the one who does most of the pushing?
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Nasu & Takeuchi |
Umm...yes. (Laugh)
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Nasu |
If I feel scared or like I can't do something, I usually pull back, and that's when Takeuchi comes in, saying, "No, you can do it."
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Takeuchi |
Mmm...but if Nasu really feels like he can do something, it can be tiring.
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Nasu |
I rarely explode like that. (Laughs) If I do, though, then I can basically keep working until I kill myself. I run in head first. And it can be problematic for other people. Like if someone tells me we only need 1, but I make 10. And then I insist that they use it all. (Laughs)
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Part 02
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Part 04
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